Flashy, fun, comedic. Not the normal epithets given to a performance of a play by Germany’s agitprop master dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Nor indeed to the story of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who narrowly escaped being burned at the stake for heresy by the Catholic church in the early 17th century.

But this is director Joe Wright, and he has scattered some of his A-list film glitter (Atonement and the upcoming Churchill biopic, Darkest Hour) over the Young Vic’s production of the Life of Galileo – that and a large helping of The Chemical Brothers, with whom Wright has worked before.

Wright has turned the Main House of London’s Young Vic into a giant planetarium with a circular chill-out zone in the centre, girdled by a wooden gangway of a stage and flanked by the audience on all sides.

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The set design is a clever echo of circular orbits, and also resembles a ship’s deck with staircase and scaffold-like rigging off to one side, and two mini wooden platform stages on opposing sides, like a ship’s bridges. It’s a physical embodiment of the inextricable link between the stars and navigation, and the voyages of discovery – geographical, scientific and societal.

Above the ship’s deck, stars shine in the planetarium dome. The projections screened on this throughout the play – using imagery from NASA and the European Space Agency – are worth the admission price alone.

Sitting down to the beats of Tom Rowlands (one half of The Chemical Brothers), it all looked promising – even though it was hard to know exactly what to expect. Random people (some of them actors, others audience members) loafed around on grey bolsters and cushions in the central chill-out zone. On one of the raised platforms, a scruffy, slightly paunchy bloke in jeans, T-shirt and New Balance trainers fist-pumped enthusiastically to the visceral trance beats.

Middle-aged raver

Was this beardy, beefy, middle-aged raver meant to be Galileo? Indeed, he was. This was Australian actor Brendan Cowell as an exuberant, earthy Galileo, at times more 1990s’ MC than tortured master scientist, in a production that was immensely (and unexpectedly) funny.

There are real, old skool Brit belly laughs when Copernicus (now Kippernikus in the recent translation of the play used here) gives Wright licence for a Carry On-style “copper knickers” joke. And a new, supposedly science-friendly pope is dressed by his aides with a ripped he-man torso pulled over his pudgy body and under his papal attire.

But by then I was beginning to crave a bit of gravitas.

That came in the second half, when supporting actors such as Billy Howle (Andrea, the 10-year-old son of Galileo’s housekeeper – and his protégé) were deeply convincing as they captured the emotional conflict at the heart of the play.

With Cowell, however, it still proved hard to get past his cocky, swaggering Galileo to the necessary angst of his tragic situation.

Galileo was in many ways an obvious choice for someone like Brecht, who wrote the play in the late 1930s after he fled Hitler’s Germany.

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus challenged nearly 2000 years of consensus to propose a solar system with the sun at its centre, upsetting the very idea of heaven. Some 70 years later, Galileo and his telescope provided evidence to back Copernicus’s model by observing the movements of the planets, the changing light and faces of our moon, and discovering the moons of Jupiter.

This threatened not only the Catholic church, but the social status quo. With no heaven, there might be no God – without God and heaven, how would the poor live out their little lives without revolt? As Galileo (Brecht’s and Wright’s) points out: forget “divine poverty”, what about “divine anger”?

Eventually, to his followers’ dismay and with the inquisitor upon him, Galileo recanted and lived out the rest of his life under house arrest in Florence.

Nuclear-powered play

Brecht revised the Life of Galileo in the light of the Manhattan Project and the first nuclear bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima: the soul-searching of those times is riven deep into the play through its complex interplay of science, politics and what it is to reason and be human. Near the end of the play, Galileo hands Andrea a copy of his book Discourses to smuggle across the border. Talking about what it is to be a scientist, to be true to science and how that may conflict with the world, he says: “Your cry of achievement will be echoed as a universal cry of horror.”

And the conflicted nature of science – the tantalising promise of its transformative power for humanity running alongside unknown, maybe harmful effects – has only intensified as more technologies (genome editing, gene drives, artificial intelligence) emerge.

The power of science, truth, societal responsibility and power at the heart of the play seem more relevant than ever at a time when facts and evidence can be dismissed much as pig-headed clerics refused to look through Galileo’s telescope and see Jupiter’s moons for themselves.

It’s moot whether this new production lightens Brecht’s play too much. Maybe the theatre has no choice but to sell serious plays this way in 2017?

Whatever. Put on your New Balances, enjoy the rave, the stars – and the ideas. This production will pull in diverse audiences, and for what Life of Galileo loses in gravitas, this unstuffy, fun version makes up in sheer exuberance and mass appeal.